As a follow-up to our post about the number of sites miscategorized by SmartFilter, our tests with Blue Coat show that miscategorization is not a problem limited to a single product. We should be skeptical of any company’s claims that they are able to categorize much of the web accurately, or that their rate of “collateral damage” is very low.

What to do about the growing “Digital Arms” market? The spread of technologies like mobile phones and social networks have enabled corporations and governments to eavesdrop on a mass scale. Fulfilling the demand for surveillance tools, a range of companies now sell surveillance backdoors and vulnerabilities, described as “lawful intercept” software.

The Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the release of Some Devices Wander by Mistake: Planet Blue Coat Redux. In this report, we use a combination of network measurement and scanning methods and tools to identify instances of Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper devices. This equipment can be used to secure and maintain networks, but can also be used to implement politically-motivated restrictions on access to information, and monitor and record private communications. We found Blue Coat devices on public networks of 83 countries. Included in these countries are regimes with questionable human rights records, and three countries that are subject to US sanctions: Iran, Syria, and Sudan.

Blue Coat Devices capable of filtering, censorship, and surveillance are being used around the world. 61 of these Blue Coat appliances are on public or government networks in countries with a history of concerns over human rights, surveillance, and censorship. Our findings support the need for national and international scrutiny of Blue Coat implementations in the countries we have identified, and a closer look at the global proliferation of “dual-use” information and communication technologies.